Sunday, July 13, 2008

Dawn Chorus is the latest in a series of films by Coates in which the human voice accurately mimics birdsong. In this multi-screen video installation 19 singers reproduce a recording of a group of wild British birds singing at dawn. Dawn Chorus explores the relationship between birdsong and its parallels with human culture and behaviour.

DATES19.07.-02.11.2008

OPENING HOURSMonday-Sunday: 10.00 am-7.00 pmFriday: 10.00 am-7.00 pm

http://www.manifesta7.it

Manifesta is one of the most important European Biennials of Contemporary Art and it takes place every two years in different cities. Being itinerant is its peculiarity, and as Documenta Kassel and the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, it is one of the highlights for international contemporary art.

In the past years Manifesta has been hosted in Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Liubljana, Frankfurt, San Sebastian.

In 2008 for the first time Manifesta will take place not in a city but in a whole region: Trentino – South Tyrol, Italy. The area has been selected for its historical heritage, its artistic and cultural facilities and especially for its striking examples of industrial archaeology buildings, which are linked to the work history and the progressive industrialisation of the territory. This land has always been a bridge between Latin and German culture and it connects cultural developments as well as Southern and Northern habits.

Manifesta 7 will take place in several venues chosen amongst the most important examples of industrial archaeology existing in the Brenner axis, from Rovereto to Trento, from Bolzano to the fortress of Fortezza, to create a broad, multi-faceted event characterized as “100 miles in 100 days”.

Along with the various exhibitions, the whole territory itself can be seen as the catalyst for a series of collateral events, encouraging research and focusing on the relationship between different cultures.

The latest in a series of architectural structures by artist Wolfgang Weileder, fold-up is a full-scale replica of 15 Norfolk Street which fronts onto the gardens. Reminiscent of an unfinished cut-out paper model, the artwork reveals the process, labour and skill of building as a visible experience. Fold-up offers a new perspective on the familiar and overlooked structures within the city, and creates a dialogue between the historic heart of Sunniside and the modern developments that are transforming this area of the city.

The project is being constructed and sponsored by Sunderland-based company r.Bau Ltd. Specialising in continental building technologies, their collaborations with Wolfgang Weileder have been an opportunity for r.Bau Ltd to demonstrate their workmanship throughout Europe. Company director Paul Webster and his team are particularly proud to be creating their most complex project to date for their home town. The speed with which fold-up will be built is achieved with dry-joint blocks which slot together without traditional mortar. For this project r.Bau Ltd will be joined by apprentices from Newcastle College, who are providing much of the joinery and roofing products and additional labour. Fold-up is a unique opportunity to learn a new technique and a high-profile showcase for their skills.

The project has been developed and supported by Sunderland City Council’s Arts Team and forms part of a major programme of temporary and permanent public art commissions throughout the city. When complete, the artwork will be open to the public for a sixteen day period, before being dismantled by r.Bau Ltd and the materials supplied to the construction college or recycled.

A documentary film and still photography will record the build process and the completed project, and these images will tour internationally to galleries and festivals. A publication of the project is also planned

The 'machinic' is a process that expresses our capacity as humans to form alliances with non-human forces, be they animal, insect, plant or virus. The exhibition 'Machinic Alliances' takes this Deleuzian premise as the basis from which to propose unholy affiliations between categories of human/animal/technological.The artworks in this exhibition seek to question, challenge, and flirt with traditional concepts of Western subjectivity. Thrown to the wind is the plot of an original wholeness and purity. Instead, 'machinic alliances' scramble and graft singular identities, creating perverse formations that escape the Oedipal trap of filiation (Donna Haraway 2004). These formations or assemblages have no father, like Frankenstein, and eschew anthropocentric identification. In their multiplicity, they push against the limits of form.Categories are undone.Awkward conjoinings arise.Inhuman differences emerge.But paradoxically, it is here in the interstitial spaces proposed by 'machinic alliances' that we can learn how to live differently. In these spaces, we can experience the 'mutual interdependences and productive mergers of forces' that characterise subjectivity at the end of the postmodern (Rosi Braidotti, 2006). The ‘new’ alliances explored by the artworks in this exhibition do not reproduce the antagonism of one self against another self, but generate a bestiary of possible selves, liberating us from the alienating problematics of narcissistic recognition and opening us up to the creative becomings of being. The artworks in this exhibition propel us to imagine wacky and wonderful possibilities for our identities. Disturbing, yet pleasurable, these 'machinations' acknowledge the difficulty of difference, yet relish in the production of anomalous differences that exceed categorization.

A catalogue will be published with writings by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Walsh

Subscribe To

About Me

Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.